Webb gets back on the expansion trail

No-premium leaseholds and low rents are the two factors that have lured pub entrepreneur Martin Webb back onto the expansion trail, he has revealed.

Webb is about to open his sixth pub in Brighton since returning to the industry after selling the C-Side group in 2001, and he plans to add four or five more houses to the upmarket Pub & Kitchen concept he has developed with partner Warrick Armsby-Ward, extending the operation into towns across Sussex.

And he says the crisis in the industry has presented him with the opportunity.

"Two or three years ago premiums were ridiculous," he said.

"Now you can get leaseholds without paying a premium and rents are much cheaper, too.

"We are in a similar situation to the early 1990s, when we built C-Side."

His latest venture, his third opening in a year, is a Brakspear lease in the street where he lives in Hove.

The Portland will be renamed the Stoneham and feature a Sicilian pizza menu and 25 flavours of home-made ice-cream.

The second Pub & Kitchen, the Dyke Tavern, opened six weeks ago and is trading well following a £250,000 refurb, to which landlord Enterprise Inns contributed more than £80,000.

"It's a brand we'd like to take outside Brighton to places with a more mature population, such as Eastbourne," he said.

Webb is also in talks about doing more TV work following his stint as a business troubleshooter on reality programme Risking It All.

However, there will be no more Robin Hoods, the profits-to-charity pub he bought after he and Simon Kirby, now Tory MP for Brighton Kemptown, made an estimated £14m from the sale of C-Side.

"That's a one-off. But the template is there if anyone else wants to use it."